Dreamforce 2015: Dream or Nightmare?

I must admit, that being a Dreamforce virgin, I was quite apprehensive about attending this year’s Dreamforce show in San Francisco. To the uninitiated, Dreamforce is the annual Salesforce user and partner conference and this year over 170,000 people were registered to attend in downtown San Francisco. I have been to large shows many times before with up to 12,000-15,000 attendees, but Dreamforce is over tenfold this number. So much so that all hotels downtown were completely booked out and Salesforce had to hire a cruise ship to dock at one of the San Francisco piers for the week to provide additional accommodation to attendees.

With these kind of mind blowing numbers: How would we literally walk the floor? Is it possible to get lunch with so many people? Would the afterhours social scene, where we tend to do a lot of business, be impossible? Will it be possible to speak to anyone at their booths?

Unfortunately form the moment we signed up to attend, the signs seemed ominous – not a hotel room downtown to be had for love nor money. We ended up getting a hotel in Milbrae out by the airport. Next problem – how to get in and out of downtown from Milbrae? We hired a car but traffic on the 101 and the cost of parking was becoming a nightmare. However, once we landed and took up residency at our hotel we quickly realized that the car was superfluous to our needs and that the BART rail system would be more than adequate at a fraction of the cost of car hire and parking charges.

With the car dilemma over, things were quickly picking up. The BART system worked a dream for early morning starts and late night returns, the queues for practical functions such as registration, demonstrations and lunch were very comfortable. It was also a plus that the exhibition room floors were well laid out and extremely easy to follow with a lot of booths having their own private meeting rooms for more in-depth discussions.

At B2BGateway, due to the nature of our EDI solution which is predominantly used in Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing markets, we found it more beneficial to meet the ERP and OMS partners that built their products on the Salesforce platform. It was wonderful to meet with such great organizations as FinancialForce.com, Rootstock, Ascent ERP, Kenandy, Sage and Accounting Seed.

Over the course of the week I must say our nightmare premonitions never came to fruition. The whole show for us was a complete dream and finishing it out with live performances by The Killers and The Foo Fighters was the icing on the cake. Here’s to Dreamforce 2016, hope to see you there!

If you would like to know more about how B2BGateway’s cloud based, fully integrated EDI solutions can work with any ERP system built on the Salesforce platform please visit www.B2BGateway.Net or email Sales@B2BGateway.Net